Editor’s note: For a different take, check out Mark Ames’ piece, which argues that the “Rally to Restore Sanity” merely served as a means for liberals to demonstrate that they are smarter than the Tea Partiers.

The aerial photos are in, settling any dispute between who was the best draw of protesters to the National Mall, Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart. The Comedy Central host won hands down over the Fox News Channel host, bringing hundreds of thousands — most of whom likely identify as liberal — to the nation’s capital for his Rally to Restore Sanity, which, in its naming, at least, was a repudiation of Beck’s Restoring Honor rally, held at the opposite end of the Mall two months ago.

But those who hoped to hear from Stewart and his colleague, Stephen Colbert, an outright condemnation of the Tea Party movement, at whom his call for “sanity” appeared to be aimed, were destined for disappointment. Stewart instead took aim at Congress the television news media — particularly cable talk shows in both the liberal and conservative camps. At times, Stewart strained, in a presumed attempt at balance, to present a pox-on-both-their houses argument.

“There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned,” Stewart told the multitudes in his closing remarks. (Video at the end of this piece.) “You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez, is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate — just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.”

In other words, to describe Tea Partiers as racist is an insult to members of the Aryan Nation or the Christian Identity movement — which is another way of saying that freewheeling accusations of fascism or racism denigrate the brutal experience of those who suffered lynchings and mass extermination.

And Stewart’s inclusion of Rick Sanchez (the former CNN host who was fired after calling Stewart, who is Jewish, a bigot and expressing resentment at the prevalence of Jews in the broadcast media) appeared to be a double-edged attempt to critique how commonplace accusations of bigotry have become, while modeling the sort of gracious behavior he wishes to see in the national political dialogue.

Yet racial resentment — if not outright racism — is a real sentiment among many Tea Partiers. An April New York Times/CBS News poll found that 52 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters surveyed agreed with the statement (PDF) that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people,” compared with 28 percent of the general population. And Tea Party Express, one of the highest-profile Tea Party groups, had to fire its spokesperson, Mark Williams, when he published a very racist satirical screed targeting NAACP Chairman Ben Jealous.

Though many in the crowd were there to counter the Tea Party madness with their saneness, they seemed undaunted by Stewart’s refusal to directly call out the Tea Party. For most, it seemed, the point was having a reason to come together, to present themselves as “real Americans” to a news media that has too often seemed to accept the Tea Party narrative that its members represent the sentiments of the regular people of flyover country. And in that, they succeeded.

Some progressives, like Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, have complained about Stewart’s call to both left and right to cool down the rhetoric, particularly when he equated right-wing depictions of Obama as Hitler with left-wing depictions of George W. Bush as a war criminal. Bush, did, for example, prosecute an illegal war that killed tens of thousands of innocents.

Others saw the event as a net plus. At a post-rally discussion at Busboys and Poets — a restaurant and gathering place for D.C. progressives — Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica’s Democracy Now!, and green jobs guru Van Jones, who was pushed from his White House post thanks to a smear campaign conducted via Fox News, both signaled their approval.

Goodman noted Stewart’s focus on the media as the problem. “I think the people there today,” she said, “they’re the ones who represent mainstream America — not the media that claims to be mainstream.”

Jones applauded “what just took place on the Mall,” saying that Stewart and Colbert had “done a significant service to the country” by showing that the majority of Americans “do not act like, think like these shrill maniacs that we see on television.” But he implored the audience to “keep the conversation going.”

“Because if we stop the conversation with what just happened on the Mall, we will effectively address the style of politics and the tone of politics, but the substance of politics has yet to be addressed. It’s not just that we need to be nicer, that we need to be more civil; we have folks who don’t have jobs — 8 million people in this country.”

A Feel-Good Day

It was a lovely, feel-good day for most who turned out for the big show. The weather was perfect and everybody behaved quite nicely, just as they had been asked to by their favorite television personality.

How vast was it? Well, when I finally made it onto the Mall, the crowd was so densely packed that it was literally impossible to move, and it was impossible to see the stage or a jumbotron. And still they came. It must have taken me 40 minutes just to find my way off of the Mall, and thousands were still pouring into the area.

The feeling was cheerful, the signs were often funny. Two people held their own versions of the Gadsden flag — you known the yellow, Revolutionary War flag with the coiled snake: One read “DON’T YELL AT ME”; the other: “DON’T STOMP ON MY HEAD.” Another read, “WE’RE TRYING TO HAVE A CIVILIZATION HERE.” This one was pretty good: “God Hates Ideologues (or is at least totally unimpressed by them).”

Milling with a throng along Constitution Avenue, a young man who appeared to be of South Asian descent held a sign high above his head that read, “Hug a Muslim” — and before my eyes, a veritable hug-fest began, with total strangers, men and women, walking up to the guy and hugging him.

A similar sentiment appeared on the tee shirt of a nice lady from Texas: “f*ck tea” read the words printed on Jane Ray’s shirt. She had traveled from the Lone Star state to meet up with her sister, Jill Burkindine, who lives in Kansas, and her son, Jake Ray, who lives in New York City.

“I came because I’m concerned about the extremism, particularly on the right,” said Burkindine.”

When pressed, she said she concurred with Stewart that the left had a problem, too. “People are too angry,” she said.

Her sister — the one with the F-word tee shirt — was less concerned about he left. “I’m a liberal,” Ray said. “It’s not a dirty word.”

On a very long line at the nearest Starbuck’s I struck up a conversation with four young women. “Are you here for the rally?” I asked.

“Well, more for observation,” replied one in a gold puffy vest. They were conservatives, two of whom work for conservative organizations, so they didn’t want their names used.

“But we all watch Jon Stewart and The Daily Show,” said her friend. “I mean, it’s entertaining.”

She said she had attended the Beck rally in August. Asked the difference between the two, she said that Beck’s event was “more American.”

“It didn’t have all the hate,” she said.

“What hate?” I asked. Honestly, there just wasn’t a whole lot of hatin’ goin’ on that I could see. Okay, well, there was Jane Ray’s tee shirt and the sign about “Tea Baggers.”

“All of that stuff about fascism,” she replied.

I turns out she saw a sign that called somebody a fascist; she wasn’t too clear on exactly what it said. But, basically, she said, she viewed today’s rally as “entertainment.”

“I think it’s more manipulative than that,” a third woman said. “People think it’s a joke, but there’s a real agenda here.” A liberal agenda, she meant.

The three women and another of their friends posited that most of the people on the mall were Hill staffers. Unlike most of the people at the Beck rally, said the woman who told me she attended it, the people on the Mall today were “mostly local.”

But I didn’t find that to be the case. In the course of five random interviews, one person was from the area. Nancy Nanion works for National Geographic, and sported a fabulous costume: she was dressed as an oil spill. She wore a dress made of scalloped black rubber, and she had painted black drips around her eyes. On her head, she wore a hat shaped like an oil tanker, which bore the name, DRILL BABY.

One of many who arrived in costume, Nancy Nanion dressed as an oil spill.

She was just one among hundreds who showed up in costumes, but hers was the best I saw. That’s unless you want to count the giant float brought by a couple dozen people, who were identified by the Washington Post as Burning Man aficionados. It was a big, gold dragon, shaped like a ship carrying a whole bunch of people dressed like Vikings, medieval swordsman, and other scary people from history. At least I think that’s what they were supposed to be.

The young Glenn Beck fan took note of the prevalence of “Legalize Pot” signs, and then the Burning Man float. “Did you see Puff the Magic Dragon?” she asked, with a roll of the eyes.

Hits, Misses, and A Missed Opportunity

In the stage show served up by Stewart and Colbert, the humor at times felt forced, especially in the deliberately odd pairings of performers: Mavis Staples with Jeff Tweedy, Ozzie Osbourne with Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens). The latter pairing was particularly odd, since neither man is known for his tolerance: Osbourne, while front-man for Black Sabbath, famously bit the head off a bird at a business meeting, and Islam made comments in 1989 that seemed to concur with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, which called for the writer’s execution.

One segment featured a mock debate between Colbert and Stewart in which Colbert, in the guise of his right-wing talk-show host persona, extolled the value of fear. Much of the segment had a Sesame-Street quality to it, with Colbert explaining why we had to fear Muslims, for example, only to be answered by Stewart ushering Karim Abdul-Jabar onto the stage. A similar bit was done around robots, with Stewart using R2D2 this time as his foil. But amid all that came a devastating series of video montages that illustrated the fear-mongering of the news media, whether over terrorism or the “great danger” posed by wearing flip-flops.

The most searing montage was saved for last, one in which Glenn Beck was featured prominently — calling the president a racist and progressivism a cancer — but also MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews, all in snips in which they charged either Tea Partiers or, in Olbermann’s case, Rush Limbaugh, with being racist. Alan Grayson’s “Republicans want you to die, and die quickly” speech from the House floor, which he made during the debate over health-care reform legislation, was also featured. There was also a snip of Frank Schaefer, who has written for AlterNet, referring to the religious right as “a village idiot.” Right-wing figures in the montage included, in addition to Beck, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity, as well as Ann Coulter.

Fair? If you’re judging by who started it, no. If you’re judging by the veracity of the claims, mixed. (I think it’s pretty safe to say the radio talk-show host who played a song parody called “Barack, the Magic Negro” is, if not racist himself, aiding and abetting racism.)

But if you’re judging by tone alone, then, point taken.

Still, for all the service Stewart and Colbert provided to their country by bringing a multitude of well-behaved liberals to the Mall on Saturday, they passed up one giant, important opportunity. They could have asked their audience — which reaches far beyond the mild-mannered mob on the Mall that assembled this weekend — to simply vote. If they’re right — that most Americans just want a sane political discourse — then they could have done an even greater service by urging all those sane Americans to get to the voting booths this Tuesday, and pull the lever for somebody who’s not crazy.

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified the name of Ozzie Osbourne’s former band, and the species of animal whose head he bit off. H/t digby._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Last edited by Him on Mon Nov 01, 2010 2:22 pm; edited 1 time in total

Editor's note: For a different take, check out Adele Stan's piece arguing that the Rally for Sanity was a repudiation of Tea Party madness.

Maybe what’s happening in America today will seem funny to some other culture in some future time -- how it happened that in the depths of America’s decline, Liberals, the great opposition to everything mean and ruthless in this culture, couldn’t muster up a get-together for anything better than a mock-in. Led by a clown.

I confess, I couldn’t hack it. I came to the rally -- saw those two pastry chefs from the Mythbusters show get all the Liberal Elites to hold a post-modern human wave, an ironic human wave allowing all the self-conscious Liberal Elites to play like Real America, while salvaging their vanity because it was all ironic and post-modern… And to make sure that everyone knew they were not really human-waving but rather meta-human-waving, the Mythbusters duo deconstructed the human wave. And all the Liberal Elites smiled and laughed knowingly, because all 150,000 were in on the biggest inside-joke wankathon in American history. And that was it for me -- I was outta there.

A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit -- now it’s been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners…and to the Liberals’ credit, they’re clearly on top. Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs -- but the main thing is, the Liberals don’t look nearly as stupid as the other guys do. And if you don’t know how important that is to this generation, then you won’t understand what’s so wrong and so deeply depressing about the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity.

That’s what makes this rally so depressing and grotesque: It’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech -- some kind of sick funeral party for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown. Not a figurative clown, but by a clown -- and Liberals are sure that this somehow makes them smarter and less lame -- and indeed, they are less lame, because they are not taking themselves too seriously, which is something they’re very, very proud of. All great political struggles and ideological advances, all great human rights achievements were won by clown-led crowds of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, duh! That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid -- or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay -- nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!

It’s the final humiliating undoing of Enlightenment Idealism that made Liberalism possible -- imagine if Jefferson, Diderot, Montesquieu, Madison et al reduced the entire Enlightenment’s struggle against the old feudal order to “I’m against the monarchy because the monarchy’s stupid…but then again, Rousseau makes a fool of himself with his Romanticism, and Tom Paine is so serious with his ‘Rights of Man’, the Revolutionaries are just as crazy as the Monarchists, so rather than join either side and risk opening myself to mockery, I’m just going to stand back and laugh at them all and say, ‘Really? Independence? Everyone is created equal and has the right to pursue happiness? Really, TJ? You sure you want to say that about Bluebeard? Really?” [LAUGH TRACK]…

It’s not Stewart’s or Colbert’s fault, let’s be clear on that -- they’re the only ones doing their job here. They’re the only ones fighting this battle, and the only way they’re surviving is by elaborately pretending they’re not really fighting anyone’s battle over anything, they’re just having a laugh -- it’s the same rationale that jesters used in medieval times, and Stewart and Colbert play the same role as the jesters did then…and we’re also playing our role as powerless peasants reduced to self-mockery and snickering at our Masters behind their backs. It’s not their fault that Liberalism today has as its highest priority not looking stupid -- and that its premiere rally is framed in such a way that everyone who came to this rally is somehow indemnified from looking foolish precisely because it’s not really a political rally, it’s more like a mockery of a political rally -- in a self-consciously smart sort of way. And the Daily Show Democrats who gathered celebrated themselves for this amazing achievement: that they didn’t make fools of themselves standing for something that some other guys could then use to mock them. That’s the biggest sin of the other side, the Tea Partiers especially, at least as the Daily Show fans see it: they look silly, and worse, they’re not shamed into suicide from looking silly, the way Liberals would be shamed into OD’ing on Ambien if they opened themselves up to that sort of mockery.

It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my generation to pillory the hippies and progressives -- that’s why we were South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made you look lame. Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is “not as crazy or stupid as Republicans” is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation’s highest value. And that makes it perfectly safe to go to something like a large political rally like Stewart’s -- you side with a hollow movement stripped of ideology or purpose, and then you gather to celebrate your own hollowness at a rally whose one promise is “You won’t open yourself up to mockery if you attend this rally” and whose goal is to show how not-stupid “we” are compared to the mockable activists on both the right and the left -- the Beckites and the Code Pinkers.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all -- looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Possibly clever, but also kind of proving his point, don't you think?_________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I suggest you take a look at the debate in the commentaries then, before you move to knee-jerk reaction, smart guy._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Uh, yeah, it's just two articles. I thought the different angles were interesting, as well as the Rally To Restore Sanity being an interesting look at the liberal left in america in general. And yeah, I know it was the One Nation Rally recently, but the Daily Show is a more interesting starting point._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Last edited by Him on Mon Nov 01, 2010 5:02 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hehehe...This reminds me of the field research term paper my wife recently did on malapropisms for her latest English class._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

Uh, yeah, it's just two articles. I thought the different angles were interesting, as well as the Rally To Restore Sanity being an interesting look at the liberal left in america in general. And yeah, I know it was the One Nation Rally recently, but the Daily Show is a more interesting starting point.

Neither interesting nor a look at the liberal left, but thanks for knowing nothing about US Politics again, Лебезятников._________________Scire aliquid laus est, pudor est non discere velle
"It is laudable to know something, it is disgraceful to not want to learn"
~Seneca